28 If t:f? , THE 1HEÄ Tn E J. "'''< I " I 1-, 0 I I \, .; c\ o, -- . t _ ø iJ ': þ' # $., I l ir )\ ' BACK AGAIN, ß"-IEFL Y A FE"'T years ago, I took a man to a program of two plays, called "\Vaiting for Lefty" and "Till the Day I Die," by Clifford Odets. My friend, an unbalanced type at best, had been lunching at the Yale Club, and had spent the greater part of the afternoon in that great scientific dairy with agree- able companions, so by the time we got to the theatre his state was enthusiastic but a trifle vague. Nobody certainly could challenge his admiration for Mr. Odets' talent, but somehow his impres- sion was that what he was watching was all the same play, and whatever abrupt shifts there were in theme or locale he put down simply to the va- garies of the artistic mind. In a way, this condition of partial eclipse seemed to me unfortunate, since both of the Odets pieces happened to be excellent and I felt he wasn't getting quite as much out of the evening as he might have. I'm embarrassed to say that I would have had no such misgivings last week at the Belasco when \Villiam Saroyan, prac- tically unassisted, put on two strenuous and short-lived fantasies: "Across the Board on Tomorrow Morning" and "Talking to You." It would, I suspect, have made very little difference whether the bemused spectator mistook the sec- ond of these compositions for a continu- ation of the first, or the other way round, or simply slept quietly through both of them, like a dormouse. Saroyan, as Saroyan and a good many other people have pointed out, is a man of considerable talent and high Chris- tian feeling-it is apparently impossible, for instance, for him to recognize the existence of a bore-but he is also the 1l'4 "But if we g-ave it to the Victory Book Campatgn, 7j)hat could we put in its place?" author of some of the most vacant and pretentious nonsense written in our time. "Across the Board" and "Talking to You," in my opinion, must come un- der this heading, and very close to the top of the class. The first, as nearly as I could make out, was simply a reaffir- mation of the author's faith in the essen- tial kindness and heauty of the human race-perhaps a debatable proposition. It involved, among a good deal else, a waiter who came out in front of the curtain and told the audience they were in for a tough evening (not at all a de- batable proposition); a young woman symbolically playing a harp on a papier- mâché cliff behind a transparency; and Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim, a poet once extremely celebrated in the tabloid press, who read a poem which struck me as regrettable. The action took place in a night club and, in the words of my fa vorite author, was characteristic of a man who had simply gone out of his way to write a play. This is probably all you need to know about the work called "Across the Board on Tomorrow Morning." The other play was more intricate and maybe a little better, though not much. In a cellar, rather sparsely fur- nished with a punching bag, a rocking horse, and a couple of chairs, one met a prize fighter called Blackstone Boule- vard, a little deaf boy, a philosophical blind man, a gangster, and a midget. The conversation in this group was not remarkable. "Can't you see at all?" somebody asked the blind man. "Only deeply," replied this dismal character in what struck me as one of the more lugubrious remarks of the eve- '-' . n In g. The performers were more or less unusual and there was a certain amount of dramatic action, so from time to time you got the impression that Ylr. Saroyan had actually written something intended to be produced on a stage. However, ex- cept for a characteristically modest and sensible performance by Canada Lee, who appeared in both plays, there was Jlothing in this production, either, to en- gage your serious attention. -\VOLCOTT GIBBS . The Germans retaliated today with widespread raids over 23 districts of Eng- land, dropping bombs at Random and machine gunning the streets of some towns, but the damage done was trivial by comparison with the havoc at Ham- burg.-Buffalo Courier-Express. There'll always be a Random.